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EVO/Android Compatibility with Mac Apps

N

NomadicTy

macrumors regular
Original poster
Feb 11, 2007
244
184
Hi!

There are already a bunch of threads dissing and praising the new EVO about it's speed, battery life, typing accuracy, or "smoothness". So, please let's keep those out of this thread, and just focus on the application syncing between the EVO/Android Mac apps. Ultimately, the effortless syncing between my mac apps and my iPhone is what I love the most about my phone. And although I love Apple, the EVO sounds like something I need to look into. Could someone please let me know how accurate the following apps sync with EVO/Android?

1.) Address Book:

a) I was wondering if EVO/Android would display the same "fields" of my contacts as in the Apple Address Book. I'm talking about the different "types" of phones, addresses, email addresses, the birthday, Related Names (child, spouse, etc.), and Note.

b) Also, do the Address Format show up as in the mac as well? For those who don't know, that's where you could set the street address of a contact according to the format of the country where that contact is from. If anybody have had to show a cab driver the address of contact in Brasil, but that address is formatted like it's in the US, they would know how important this is.

c) Smart Groups - interestingly, I just realized that the iPhone does not display Address Book Smart Groups. So this is a long shot for Android -- does it show Smart Groups?


2.) iCal:

a) Does Android show all the calendar entries from iCal?
b) Does Android get the birthdays of one's contacts from Address Book, and add it into a "Birthdays" calendar?


3.) Safari:

a) Does Android sync Safari bookmarks?

b) How about Firefox for mac, which is my secondary browser?


4) iTunes - I'm assuming Apple would have to make an iTunes app for the Android to make everything work , but these questions are long shots:

a) Do iTunes playlists sync into Android, including Smart Playlists?

b) I'm not a cheapskate, so I have bought lots of music legally from iTunes, which of course, came with DRM. Can Android play these music as well?

c) Album art - one of the reasons I bought music from iTunes is for the album art - do these show up in the Android music player?


5) iPhoto/Aperture photos - I use both. Do these synch as well? I'm not talking about browsing through the computer and choosing actual photo files. I have thousands of fotos, so this would be cumbersome. I'm talking about picking iPhoto albums or Aperture Projects/Albums.

If anybody else have questions about other mac apps and how it would synch with the EVO or Android phones, feel free to add your questions.

Thanks!
 
I owned both the droid and the incredible. iCal, address book, email will work and sync nicely only if you have it synced to your gmail account. Music syncing is terrible because it relies on you dragging and dropping your files to the memory card. Pictures relies mostly on drag an drop too. you can install third party applications on your mac like missing sync but they crashed on me a lot when I transfered large files. Overall the android os is not very polished and user friendly like the iPhone.
 
Google does exchange-like things with ActiveSync or whatever they call it. I use google apps on my iphone and have my contacts, calendars, etc in the cloud and synced with ical and addressbook on snow leopard.

Pretty nice FREE exchange-like service IMO.

Too bad google probably collects info on you the whole time you use it.

Advertising is a bad end-game for the consumer.
 
It really sounds like there will be too much hassle for someone with those demands to go Android IMO.

Your iTunes DRM'd music will not play on anything but an iPod/iPad/iPhone but I believe DoubleTwist does some magical re-encoding to remove DRM from iTunes purchases if that kind of thing interests you.

Contacts & calendars can be set up to sync from your mac to Google and then onto an Android device but I don't personally know if it's at the same level as you need. All I can say is it works for me!

Missing Sync for Android might be the best solution for most of those needs but the whole Apple/Mac/iPhone platform can't be beat in that respect.

If that is a fault of Android or Apple's reluctance to let rival devices work with Apple's software is another matter.
 
Of course, the whole point of iTunes is to help lock the user into the Apple ecosystem. Which is fine, if you're okay with that.

As for contacts, calendar and email, I use Google because it's ActiveSync push, and it's so easy to move between all brands of phones (Android, WinMo, iPhone, RIM, Palm) and home computers. Every time I get a different phone, I just enter the Google server info (if even required) and a few seconds later everything is sync'd up.

Except bookmarks. The downside is I don't have hundreds of them from my laptop. The upside is that I don't have hundreds of them... just the ones I need most.
 
I forgot to mention that I don't use, nor plan to use, Google address book to store my contacts. I think my contacts, and the details I put on them, are private data which I just would not entrust to a company who's main goal is to gather as much data as possible... But that's just me... I don't really care about the whole cloud (google or otherwise) to phone syncing. Just the phone to mac syncing...

@ ChazUK - thanks for that Doubletwist info. I'll look into that regarding iTunes music syncing.

I've looked at the photos synching, and I don't why it would not be possible. I opened up Picasa 3 and I see that it's able to see iPhoto albums. I'm assuming an android app should be able to do the same, as well as Aperture albums. Once it's able to view those albums, it should be able to sync the photos inside them.

As it looks like now, it seems it would be too much trouble for me to switch over with my current requirements. I may have to wait for Android apps that are geared for syncing with macs. Or I may have to wait for an iPhone with the bad-a** features that make me really interested about the EVO - 4G and hotspot... Exciting times!
 
You could get The Missing Sync. I use it for syncing my Windows Mobile phone with my iMac. It works great. This way, you don't have to give Skynet (I mean Google) all of your contact and calendar information.
 
kdarling said:
Except bookmarks. The downside is I don't have hundreds of them from my laptop. The upside is that I don't have hundreds of them... just the ones I need most.
Click to expand...

I use a little Android app called MyBookmarks to sync the bookmarks between the Android browser and "the cloud".. works like a charm. Although, this kind of thing should be built into OS.. hopefully in Gingerbread ;)
 
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